vivo V5 Review: Made for Selfie Addicts

Unlike most Chinese Phone makers which sell their products online through sites like Aliexpress and Banggood, vivo is actually sold in-store, in Malaysia at least. If you take a walk into a shopping complex, here, you can see stores or phone kiosk selling vivo-branded phones. Last week I bumped into vivo V5, which I think an amazing selfie phone.

vivo V5: Made for selfies

Back then the cute promoter girl, tell me that this V5 have a 20MP selfie camera. Sadly I don’t have the photo, of me and the girl taking a selfie together, but I think I this phone is worth to be reviewed. I’m currently waiting for UMi Z, so having to write about a phone that I don’t care is a way to fill my free time, by the way, did I tell you about the cute promoter girl? I think I’m writing this because of her.

The selfie camera is superb, 20MP with f/2.0 aperture is super big pixels to be fit in a selfie camera. The front camera is way better that the 13MP main camera. The problems, there is always problems, of course, the front camera is overexposed. I realize that under artificial lighting the selfie camera really not that good. If you get to test it, you can’t really tell the difference if you post it on Instagram. But on a computer, you can see the problem.

Another thing is, if you move while taking a selfie, oh my god I tell you, horrible. But the rest is good. It also comes with “Moonlight Flash”. Well what can I say about it, it’s a flash for the camera. The under low light it works great. The camera app comes with ‘One-tap makeover’, so you can so-called finetune your selfie. The not problem is, the camera will auto focus for you and blurred the background, so you will get a nice selfie.

vivo V5 review – image ikr99

vivo V5 review – image ikr99

vivo V5: Design

Front design, it has a very common look. White body, except the display, shiny-rectangularly-home button with fingerprint scanner, a tiny selfie camera earpiece and two tiny sensors. This phone is released in December last year and have been displayed all most of the time, for promotion, and I didn’t even notice it, until last week. Rear design looks like iPhone 6. There is the 13MP camera with flash, which I think that will be forgotten by the user. If you have 20MP and 13MP camera, I think most people will use the 20MP. There two lines just like the the iPhone 6 and vivo trademark and a little writing. The good thing is, you can actually feel the metal body.

vivo V5: Specification

vivo V5 comes with 4GB memory with 32GB storage. Listening to this specifications, I think this phone a flagship for vivo, so when I got home after I’m done playing CS:GO, I did some DuckDuckGoing, no more Googling, I found out that there are two more V5s coming called V5 Plus and V5 lite. The conclusion is I still don’t know whether this phone a flagship or not for vivo.

Other specifications are 153.8×75.5×7.6 mm in size, which is not singlehand friendly, 5.5-inch display with 720×1280 pixels, that I think work OK with the device, you know to browse the internet or Twitter or Insta, and Mediatek MT6750 with Octa-core 1.5 GHz and Mali-T860MP2 GPU, well for a new phone it work well. For the battery, it takes around 3 hours to fully recharge the 3,000MAh battery, according to the cute girl.

vivo V5: Software

The vivo V5 come with Funtouch OS 2.6 which based on Android 6.0. The icons are customized well and the animations are smooth, for me. For Nougat, there are no words from vivo and the cute promoter. One thing that I notice, Facebook comes as a stock app, so I don’t think that it can be removed. It also comes with Smart Split, where you can split the display into two, like one for Whatsapp and one for Youtube. Unlike most phones that I reviewed previously, this phone is actually sold in-store, so the support is not bad I guess. If you have any problem just send it to where you buy it. If you like to buy online you can get it at Lazada.com.my.

Overall

Camera

Hardware

Software

Summary

An amazing selfie phone with superb specifications. It has a very firm body, that supports multitasking, a real multitasking. For the price at MYR1299, I think it's OK phone.